


touch

by dreadfulbeauties



Category: Original Work
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:01:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24818029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadfulbeauties/pseuds/dreadfulbeauties
Summary: Ivan in the aftermath of war.
Kudos: 1





	touch

What keeps Ivan awake at night the most is that during his time as a prisoner he _hadn’t_ wished to go home.

He’d wished he was dead. He wished that he was rendered stiff and incapable of feeling, so that he wouldn’t have to feel another hypodermic needle piercing his skin ever again. Ivan remembers sitting so stiff and wide-eyed, feeling the magic worm its way into his mind to contaminate him. He can remember the smell of blood sour in the dimly-lit room and how he’d frantically shaken his head and kept asking “Where’s Baxter? Where’s Baxter?”

Baxter sleeps by his side at night. They found his dragon when they’d rescued him from the prison camp and hauled him back on a stretcher. Baxter would live, they’d told Ivan, for another fifty or sixty years ago—and wasn’t that so lucky for a dragon who had gone through so much! But they said that the damage that he’d been dealt to his wings was so severe that he’d never be able to fly again. That means Ivan is permanently bound to the ground, too.

Ivan still wishes he had died.

He tenses up when a door so much as creaks open, though he knows that the soldiers from Terra can’t reach him here—he saw them get shot in the head when he’d been saved, it’s not real, he tells himself, you don’t have to tense up. He can’t sleep even on the nights when he doesn’t think, “What if I dream about vomiting black blood and falling again? I don’t want that.” And there are parts of his memory that aren’t there, too. There’s a gap between when he was taken prisoner to some of those moments spent in the camp, parts of his mind that have been scooped out entirely. And yet even though he is safe some days he ends up _back_ in the camp, the tips of needles gleaming bright in his eyes.

There are nights spent in the privacy of his room crying so hard he throws up. He can’t have Cora move in with him if he’s in such a state. She’d know how weak he is (as if she didn’t know already, she was the one who stitched up his wounds for Sagien’s sake).

Major Capelli had been right when he’d said that they wouldn’t really be able to go home again.

**Author's Note:**

> a bit different from what i usually write.


End file.
